The Flint Water Problem

A town in Michigan, thankfully brought to media attention by Mr. Larry Gabriel, an author for Yes! magazine, had experienced water issues courtesy of their government. The town, Flint, was experiencing hair loss, rashes, and respiratory infections due to an increase in lead in their water supply. These problems were caused by Governor Rick Snyder for the appointment of the Emergency Manager who made the switch. So perhaps Rick shouldn't be Governor if he can’t make the proper precautions to ensure the safety of his citizens?
In the article, it states how the Governor believed that switching the water lines to receive from Lake Huron, treated by the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, to the Flint River, treated by the Flint Water Treatment plant. Now this may have been an ok idea. The state would save some money, roughly $5 million over the course of two years, and normally Water Treatment plants are very thorough with their treatment. But this plan would have worked had the Flint Water Treatment plant added any anticorrosion chemicals to their water purification process, which they didn’t. The effect of such ignorance? Anywhere in between 1-100,000 people have been contaminated by lead-poisoning, 60% of those were minorities and 40% were living under the poverty level.
A Coalition, dubbed ‘Water You Fighting For’, was formed in 2014, and contacted Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech environmental engineering professor, and both the group and Marc worked together to distribute 300 water testing kits to the citizens of Flint. Marc expected to get, at most, 75 kits to be returned. He got back 277, each one pointing to a serious lead-problem in the Flint water supply. Such an experiment normally needs a ton of feedback from the community to be accurate. Meaning the more that came back, the more data there was. In this case, there is a ton of data.
Luckily Virginia Tech has appointed Marc Edwards to the newly created Flint Water Interagency Committee, tasked with finding a solution to the water crisis. Something that Governor Rick Snyder seems to have no idea how to do
The whole plan that the Governor had come up with was supposed to save the town of Flint $5 million dollars. But now that this has happened, not only will the people of Flint who have been contaminated by this water will need to have social, mental, and physical treatment, costing the state billions of dollars in bills, as well as having to revert back to Detroit water, they no longer have the trust of its citizens. Governor Rick could have ensured that the Water Treatment plant was adding everything is needed to be up to par with acceptable water standards. But instead he handed it over to a new manager of emergencies, and allowed him to neglect the town’s need for clean, chemical-free water.